Keller & Weberman: Source(s) of intelligibility

When, in Being and Time  , Heidegger describes human beings or “Dasein” as “being-in-the-world,” the relation between human beings and their world is not an accidental one. As Heidegger makes explicit, the world in which Dasein exists is not simply a collection of objects, but a “relational totality . . . we call significance” which is “disclosed beforehand with a certain intelligibility [Verständlichkeit]” (SZ   87, 86). [1] Elsewhere Heidegger writes that the world, the background against which humans project their possibilities, has meaning (Sinn) and that meaning is “that wherein the intelligibility of anything is sustained” (SZ   151). The world is from the outset something intelligible and significant to human beings. It is not, as other philosophical models might have it, something which could turn out to be unintelligible to us.

It is true, as Heidegger points out, that discrete entities sometimes show up as unintelligible (as in our encounters with nature). Yet in such cases, “unintelligible” natural events and entities always manifest themselves within the context of the intelligible worldliness of the world (SZ   211). In other words, it is in light of what is intelligible that the unintelligible appears as unintelligible. So, intelligibility is a fundamental feature of our world and, whether wholly or deficiently, of the entities within it. [2] Two further points deserve mention: First, such intelligibility is not a matter of theoretical understanding [370] or understandability as envisaged within the Platonic, Leibnizian or Kantian traditions. The type of intelligibility operative in Heidegger is prior to and independent of theoretical inquiry. Second, to say that the world is immediately intelligible should not be understood to mean that the way in which the world is immediately intelligible represents its most accurate rendering.

But now the following question arises: What is it that provides for this intelligibility and our consequent ability to come to grips with the world around us? What exactly is the source of intelligibility in Heidegger? Recent Wittgensteinian interpretations of Heidegger deserve credit for bringing this question to the forefront. [3] Their answer has been that the source of intelligibility lies in alternatively 1) discourse and language or 2) Heidegger’s “das Man” (“the they” or “the anyone”) and its “everyday practices.” In Parts I and II of this essay, we argue that these are mistaken, albeit instructive, interpretations. In Part III, we put forth our own candidate for the source of the intelligibility of Dasein’s world. It is the temporality of the care structure of Dasein, conceived as underlying and unifying in a non-reductive fashion Heidegger’s existentials (Existenzialien) or conditions for the possibility of human existence.